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New Pennsylvania Research Commons Portal Expands Research Visibility

The following press release was provided to the Penn Libraries by Scholarly Communications Librarian Shawn Martin.

PHILADELPHIA, PA The University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson University, and West Chester University are pleased to announce the launch of Pennsylvania Research Commons. The Commons is a new digital portal that showcases research and academic scholarship conducted in Pennsylvania, from undergraduate journals to faculty monographs, and makes this work openly accessible to scholars around the world. The new digital portal site features a real-time global readership map, highlighting the international reach and significance of research from Pennsylvania institutions.

“Global impact is one of the cornerstones of our strategic plan, and portals like the Pennsylvania Research Commons help to expand and measure the reach of Penn scholarship around the world,” says Shawn Martin, the Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions and hosted by bepress on its Digital Commons platform, the Pennsylvania Research Commons aggregates content from the institutional repositories of nineteen Pennsylvania institutions. Institutional repositories are playing an increasingly significant role in the way universities share, manage, and preserve their scholarly outputs.

Walter Cressler, the Science Librarian and Repository Administrator at West Chester University, states, “The Pennsylvania Research Commons enhances the impact of the state’s institutional repositories by providing a platform for regional scholarly and creative collaboration and a showcase that highlights some of the unique resources of Pennsylvania.”

The Commons includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work. Users can type in search terms for easy discovery or browse content by institution, discipline, or author.

The Commons also showcases unique collections and notable archives of regional interest and local history, providing primary materials for research about the Keystone State. Daniel Kipnis, Senior Education Librarian and Editor of the Jefferson Digital Commons at Thomas Jefferson University, notes: “The Pennsylvania Research Commons (PRC) is a great online portal to share high quality research being conducted in the Keystone State. Along with capturing conferences on various topics, the PRC also highlights oral histories and other special collections for a global audience. Thomas Jefferson University is pleased to contribute to this valuable portal.”

Bepress is the provider of Digital Commons, the leading hosted institutional repository software platform. Digital Commons is a suite of tools and services that enables institutions to manage, display, and publish scholarship to the web in a beautiful, highly visible showcase. Digital Commons offers the features of a traditional institutional repository as well as professional-grade publishing software, management tools, and individual faculty and researcher pages to promote and disseminate scholarship and serve academia.